Doris Lessing Quotes

Trust no friend without faults, and love a woman, but no angel.

There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.

Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history cannot.

I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't teach, one, that writing is hard work, and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.

What's terrible is to pretend that second-rate is first-rate. To pretend that you don't need love when you do; or you like your work when you know quite well you're capable of better.

It is my belief...that the talents every child has, regardless of his official 'I.Q,' could stay with him through life, to enrich him and everybody else, if these talents were not regarded as commodities with a value in the success-stakes.

Oh, I simply can’t think. When I really want to depress myself, I think of all the brilliant men I know, married to their stupid wives. Enough to break your heart, it really is

This is an inevitable and easily recognizable stage in every revolutionary movement: reformers must expect to be disowned by those who are only too happy to enjoy what has been won for them.

Women often get dropped from memory, and then history.

With a library you are free, not confined by temporary political climates. It is the most democratic of institutions because no one - but no one at all - can tell you what to read and when and how.

[...] students should be told that an effort is always required, when you start to read a serious author, to overcome mental laziness and reluctance, because you are about to enter the mind of someone who thinks differently from yourself. And that is the whole point and the only point: the literary treasure-house has many mansions.

Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty.

Yes, cannibals. People are just cannibals unless they leave each other alone.

The boulder is the truth that the great men know by instinct, and the mountain is the stupidity of mankind.

Free women," said Anna, wryly. She added, with an anger new to Molly, so that she earned another quick scrutinizing glance from her friend: "They still define us in terms of relationships with men, even the best of them.

I am a person who continually destroys the possibilities of a future because of the numbers of alternative viewpoints I can focus on the present.

That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way.

I write all these remarks with exactly the same feeling as if I were writing a letter to post into the distant past: I am so sure that everything we now take for granted is going to be utterly swept away in the next decade.

(So why write novels? Indeed, why! I suppose we have to go on living as if ...)